


Hello Again

by ooihcnoiwlerh



Series: Richie and Eddie Adventures [1]
Category: IT (Movies - Muschietti)
Genre: Character Study, Closeted Characters, Coming Out, Eddie Kaspbrak Loves Richie Tozier, Fix-It, Friends to Strangers to Friends to Lovers, Friendship, Gay Eddie Kaspbrak, Gay Richie Tozier, Homophobia, Homophobic Slurs, M/M, Pining, Richie Tozier Loves Eddie Kaspbrak, Richie's perspective, The Losers are Good Friends, Unbeta'd, a traumatized closeted repressed middle-aged man, all the losers live, and his love for another traumatized closeted repressed middle-aged man, edited in post, including Stan, with support from their repressed traumatized middle-aged friends
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-21
Updated: 2019-10-21
Packaged: 2020-12-27 23:20:56
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 15,948
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21126926
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ooihcnoiwlerh/pseuds/ooihcnoiwlerh
Summary: Richie Tozier doesn't think too much about not remembering his childhood until he gets a call from a long-forgotten friend about a long-repressed past.





	Hello Again

**Author's Note:**

> -So, I know this has been done before, but I had a lot of feelings seeing It Chapter Two and, well, just needed to post them in a gargantuan one-shot online.  
-There are some inconsistencies in the dialogue and small events, most of it intentional as I wanted to account for Stan's presence in this storyline and Eddie's survival. I do rehash some parts from the movie, but hopefully not in too much detail, as it's not my intention to just recount the movie with occasional internal monologue from Richie. I do also skim over some bits for the purpose of not wanting to just rehash the movie, and include some moments between Richie and his fellow Losers.

Richie Tozier remembers almost nothing about his childhood. He knows he lived in a small new England town called Derry, Maine until he was sixteen, but little of it rings familiar. Maybe it was so unbearable his brain actively represses those memories. It’s entirely possible—hell, probable. Healthy, well-adjusted men don’t normally make their living telling crude jokes they didn’t write about girlfriends they neither have nor want. They also probably don’t wake up screaming from nightmares they can’t remember but felt so viscerally familiar during sleep. So, shitty childhood he’s better off not remembering. A good shorthand response to interviewers who ask.

But it can’t have been all bad. There are flashes of things, of feelings of joy, of friendship. And a boy. There’d been some boy who first made him realize…

There was one. He knows there was one. Occasionally he catches something, that first crush, those butterflies and an overwhelming need to be the most important part of someone else's life. He'd just rather not be hit with those butterflies and everything those memories entail right before he has to go onstage.

Richie winces and pinches the bridge of his nose.

He has a show tonight; a pretty standard bit. Something about a nonexistent girlfriend catching him jerking off to something objectionable. Then something about his dick. Then something about celebrities. Then some more masturbation jokes with celebrity references thrown in for variety. Then it’s off to drink himself into a surefire hangover that will wear off by the next night.

He’s getting ready and contemplating a pre-show shot when he gets a call.

_Derry, Maine_

He knows no one from there, remembers no one from there. And yet he freezes. His stomach, sitting nearly empty, gives a lurch as he answers.

“Hello?”

A man, Mike Hanlon…

_Mike Hanlon_. He hasn’t heard that name before, can’t have, but it’s immediately familiar. But he knows him. Knew him. He realizes that this is someone who probably knows him better than most.

And this person tells him he needs to come back to Derry. Tells him it’s crucial.

And a bunch of memories hit him like a punch to the gut. A group of people he cared about, losers like him. Some of the best people he’s ever known. Constant, gnawing fear of being found out and having his life ruined by some of the shittiest people he’s ever known. A boy, loud and frantic and earnest. And terror, unknown and too awful to speak of. 

“Okay, Mike,” he says, before hanging up.

His stomach gives another turn.

He tells himself he's fine and there's nothing weird about any of this before he vomits.

\---

The plane ride from LAX to O’Hare is smooth enough; he stopped caring about his manager chewing him out for the worst set he’s ever done (“You only say that because you didn’t see my standup in college”) and he has a bourbon rocks to calm his nerves and this time he keeps it together as he thinks about what he _can_ remember. Six friends, three of whom he’d known nearly his whole life, three he met when he was thirteen. 

Something happened, something fucking traumatizing, because so much of it is blocked out. 

Fuzzy shapes start to come back to him when he takes the connecting flight to Bangor.

_Trashmouth._ People have been calling him that since he was just a kid and he didn’t even remember. There were other, crueler nicknames. _Fairy, fag, faggot, cocksucker_. And those were just the ones directed at him personally.

There were seven of them—six boys, one girl—and all of them outcasts. The names aren’t coming to him, though. Maybe if he sees them? He wonders as the plane lands and he picks out the prettiest and most ostentatious car he can find at the rental. Sure. He’ll remember their names when he sees their faces, unlike every other time he’s seen a person he knows is familiar but whose names he couldn’t remember with a gun to his head.

He checks in to the Derry Townhouse first, gets his keys, drops his duffle bag onto a very precarious-looking antique bed, and as he descends the stairs to go back out bemoans not having the time to pregame at the hotel bar before dinner. Then he sees someone sitting in the hotel lobby; a head of dark curls and what Richie would call a “dad sweater.” Even before he sees the man’s face Richie remembers he must know him.

“Hey, so, are you with the…” Richie starts.

The man looks up at him from his phone. He stands, eyes wide and a nervous little smile tugging at his face.

“_Richie?_” he asks.

Richie Tozier is, well, he’s not _not _famous. People recognized him in the airport and by the car rental. But he’s inexplicably aware that the man in front of him does not give a shit about Richie’s career and in fact recognizes him from a very different place than his standup. And there’s something in his eyes that gives him away.

“Stan. Stanley Uris. Holy shit.” The name comes back to him the moment he opens his mouth, and Stan rises to meet him. 

Richie can’t help it; he hugs someone he hasn’t remembered in decades. Then he pulls back and takes a good look at him. “When’d you stop aging? 2004?”

Stan chuckles and looks down at the floor. Richie’s serious. Stan looks great; looks healthy and hardly a day over thirty, and Richie’s as cognizant as ever of various comments made on twitter about how Richie Tozier looks like a fifty-year-old man with bad skin and worse teeth.

“How’ve you been?” Richie asks as they start for the door. “What’s your number? We need to catch up.”

“I’m good, actually. I have an accounting firm in Atlanta,” he says, before giving Richie his number. “Been married since 2005.”

“Kids?” Richie asks absentmindedly as he texts Stan his digits.

He looks up in time to see a shadow pass over Stan’s face.

“No. We’re…no kids yet.” He regains a slight smile.

Richie suddenly remembers Stan always being serious, fastidious, old for his age. None of that has changed, but he seems to be slowly growing into the old man he was always meant to be. The thought makes Richie smile back as they head out to the parking lot.

“Want a lift?” Richie asks, gesturing to his rental as Stan heads towards his own.

Stan raises his phone. “Sorry, have to call my wife. I’ll meet you there, though?” he says, and Richie will realize after all this is over why Stan actually said no. He assumed Richie would take off immediately after hearing the news and leave him stranded.

Current Richie doesn’t know any of this, shrugs, and heads to the restaurant. He doesn’t think it was around when he was a kid, but doubts he would have gone were it around when there were chicken fingers and potato chips to be had. Stan pulls in moments after him and they find, at the entrance, two people in an embrace. Nothing weird about that, but, like before, Richie has the uncanny understanding that he knows—used to know—these people very well.

He recognizes Bev first, and she looks beautiful. It takes a moment to place the man with her.

And then a second later, it clicks, and he wonders, _When did Ben Hanscom get hot?_

_And am I going to walk in there and see _everyone’s_ aged better than I have?_

Unfortunately, yes. Mike, Bill, and Eddie are already there when he follows Stan, Ben, and Bev into the private dining room. Fucking maddening that Mike and Bill look like they could star in commercials selling masculine yet tasteful cars but seeing Eddie…

He’s still short and thin, still has neatly combed hair and solemn, dark eyes and he smiles awkwardly at him and

Oh

_Oh_. 

Oh _fuck_.

Twenty-seven years and every heartsick memory resurfaces. Teasing Eddie to get his attention again and again, hoping to God he was being discreet. Trying to tread the line between playful insults and flirting, wanting everything he was too terrified to ask for. 

He’s felt so long as though something was missing; a void he was never able to fill no matter what distractions he took. The memories slowly coming back of what this group of awkward and unpopular children called themselves—the Losers Club—have started to fill that void. But it’s remembering the fussy, opinionated, anxious boy who talked a mile a minute and went through an inhaler a week and seeing the man he’s become that lets the final piece fall into place.

_It’s you. I’ve been missing you all these years_.

Eddie’s looking at him. Richie manages to compose himself, and does what any self-respecting middle-aged man greeting someone he’s just realized he’s been in love with for thirty years would do: he teases Eddie relentlessly. 

He asks the waitress if she perhaps has any children’s menus, and perhaps a booster seat for Eddie, to which Eddie replies, “Oh, fuck _off_, dude.”

Which, of course he doesn’t. He feels like he’s thirteen again, trying all the same tactics. He remembers well enough that he was shameless back then. He might actually be worse now.

The dynamic here feels right; this is how they’ve always worked. Richie takes his shot (_hands free, he might add. Impressed yet, Eddie?_) and asks, “So, wait, Eddie, you got _married_?”

Of course he did; Richie noted the ring the moment everyone sat down and he shouldn’t have been surprised by it. Of course he’s married. Why wouldn’t he be? Stan and Bill also sport wedding rings, so why not Eddie?

Eddie can already see the insults coming and is quick to defend himself, snapping, “Yeah. Why is it so fucking funny, dickwad?”

“What, to, like, a woman?” Richie asks, and only half hates himself for it. He’s only a forty-year-old closeted man being a hypocrite and making a gay joke. Nothing he hasn’t done, and nothing he has to lose.

“Fuck you, bro.” 

Richie chuckles. “Fuck _you!_” he retorts, delighted. And of course, he can’t avoid making a joke about Eddie’s mother—those annoyed him so—and it does make everyone laugh. Even Stan, sitting awkwardly between them, cracks a smile. The laughs get louder as Richie pulls out his best Jabba the Hut impression (_See? My voices have gotten a lot better, haven’t they, Eddie?_) and Stan rests his elbows on the table and buries his face in his hands. On his other side, Eddie responds with overblown sarcasm.

Stan lifts his head up, and there is a reluctant smile tugging at his lips as he turns to Richie. “Would you like to switch places with me?” he asks.

“Great idea, Stan!” Richie says before anyone else can say anything, and he hears Ben and Bev discuss Ben’s architecture firm as Richie and Stan shift their plates and glasses.

Richie smirks at Eddie, who looks back with his eyebrows raised. For a moment Richie wonders if maybe, oh shit. Too obvious? He glances over at Ben, who’s giving Bev a fond smile, and decides to switch gears.

Richie can’t say he’s even exaggerating when he says Ben looks like every Brazilian soccer player rolled into one, because damn, he just _looks that good_. Ed—seemingly grudgingly—nods at Richie’s assessment, and the resemblance Ben had to the kid he was comes back when he ducks his head and looks like he would rather be literally anywhere other than the topic of conversation. Richie backs off when Bev gently scolds him. But seriously, who can blame him for pointing it out?

And he misses making people laugh with jokes _he _came up with. He misses—_fuck_, he misses this. He traded in the few people who’d give grudging laughs at his dumb character voices when he was a nineteen-year-old college student for sycophants who care only about the money he’s made from jokes he never wrote. Now he’s back with people who, sure, just as often rolled their eyes at his jokes but still genuinely enjoyed his company when he had nothing to offer but his dumb, constantly running mouth. He doesn’t get how he could have forgotten these people, and the warmth in his chest that settles when he’s with them. How could he have left them behind, when he’s never felt more at ease being himself, never felt happier with anyone else? 

And how the _fuck _could he ever have forgotten Eddie? A guy couldn’t forget him or ignore him if he tried. Eddie would simply dig in his heels and demand to be noticed. Especially after Richie’s jokes at the expense of Eddie’s job and after Eddie’s had two cups of sake (“_It’s fine. It’s gluten-free_”) Eddie braces his elbow on the table and says, “Y’know, I won last time we did this. If you want to challenge me, fine.”

“You_ won_?” Richie asks. “With what stepladder?”

“You don’t win arm-wrestling by height, dumbass, just…c’mon.”

Richie, well, Richie would like to say that he accepts because he needs to assert his strength over a man wearing a baby-blue polo shirt and who’s four inches shorter than he is, but that’s not the case and he doesn’t bother to lie to himself about it. Eddie’s stronger than he first appears, and the lopsided grin on his face is utterly infectious. 

“Let’s take our shirts off and kiss!” Eddie announces, smirking as he has Richie locked in a stalemate. Richie’s ears burn; he hears everyone chuckling, and for a moment he wonders if Eddie knew then and knows now and wants to fuck with him and no, not that way. Eddie’s grip becomes lax in his and Richie wins—to what he would like to interpret as deafening cheers.

And Richie would love to catch up to each and every Loser; really, he would. He cared about all of them and finds yes, he immediately does once more but. He can’t _not_ talk to Eddie. 

Which is great, because Eddie still talks a mile a minute and still has the most misguided and ridiculous opinions on what is or isn’t healthy. It’s honestly better than any standup Richie’s done in years. Richie’s pretty sure Eddie looked most of the hypothetical symptoms for shit he doesn’t have on WebMD when Eddie’s claims get particularly outlandish. He wants to say, _There is nothing wrong with you except anxiety left over from whatever shit your mom told you_, but he doesn’t. He mostly just likes hearing Eddie rant, even as he rolls his eyes at him. 

He tells the group how happy he is to see them, includes a self-deprecating anecdote about how he’d vomited when he first got the call for some reason, but couldn’t be more pleased to be surrounded by old friends.

And it seems as though the very pH of the room has changed. Eddie looks nervously at him as he admits he crashed his car. The energy shifts as people express how disconcerted—no, how momentarily overcome they were with terror before any hint of nostalgia took over.

“It’s fear,” Mike says. Richie sees it in his eyes even as his voice is steady.

Bill turns to look at him; there’s something accusing in his stammer as he asks, “Why do we all f-feel like that, Mike?”

Stan shifts beside him and speaks first. “It came back,” he says. His voice is quiet but everyone catches his words. And suddenly, fucking unfortunately, Richie knows exactly what he means. He knows the terror in his gut, that’s haunted his dreams, that seemed abated for a while.

Mike looks over at Stan. “Yes.”

“Pennywise the clown,” Bev says, staring at her lap.

_Shit_.

It seems even the fortune cookies are fucking with them, and even Mike has no idea how it happened, how every moment seems like it’s ticking down to a waking nightmare. Seven slips of paper, arranged carefully, provide the message

_You will never be free of me_

And then shit starts getting _really_ weird.

\--

Richie has seen and done some weird shit, including, apparently, when he was a child but now he’s a forty-year-old man with obligations and stray gray hairs and he can’t do this. He won’t do this; this _suicide mission_. He’s starting to remember how they barely made it alive the first time back when they were young and hopeful and not bogged down by a million responsibilities. And he’s angry; why can’t he have just gotten the memories, the friends, the endless banter and warmth whenever Eddie was around and skipped the nightmare?

_At least_, he thinks, _Eddie’s on my side_. They exchange a resolute glance as they start to head to their respective cars.

“Stan, c’mon,” he hears Mike say, sounding desperate. Richie glances back over at them, and he senses Eddie pause as well.

Stan glances at Richie and Eddie, then at Bev. “Mike…” he looks the most apologetic. “I came back knowing the stakes. And I know as much as you do that nothing will change if everyone’s not on board. And if they’re not willing to do this,” he shrugs. “Then neither am I.”

They leave as Mike is pleading his case with Bill. Bill can do what he likes; hell, this situation is reminiscent of some of his horror stories. Maybe he thinks he’s getting material for his new book.

He and Eddie get to the hotel right after Ben and Bev, and park across from each other.

“That car is ridiculous, by the way,” Eddie tells him as he gets out. 

“It’s called _style_, Eds,” Richie says mildly.

“Something you’ve never possessed, I’m aware,” Eddie retorts as they head inside.

“Didn’t you use to wear a fannypack at all times?” Richie asks.

“Didn’t you use to wear shoes with no socks?” Eddie responds. They head to their respective rooms and it takes Richie all of thirty seconds to get his shit together, get Eddie, and leave this town in the dust. 

\--

“You saw all of us _die_?”

It’s quite the bomb to drop when he and Eddie—_with two giant suitcases and more he needs to bring down, Jesus, how long was he planning on staying here?—_are ready to get the fuck out of Dodge and Bill and Mike have only just walked in.

Bev, in addition to becoming a fashion designer, also has nightly visions of everyone’s gruesome deaths, apparently. Richie’s been away too long. It’s not enough to stop him leaving, not at first. Then Bev drops another bomb, this time on Stan.

“You were going to die last night,” she tells him.

They all turn to Stan, who freezes and sinks into the nearest chair. “You saw…?” he says, his voice barely above a whisper.

Bev’s face is sheet-white, tear tracks like trenches down her cheeks as she nods. “Yeah,” she says, her own voice barely louder.

“And now?”

Bev shakes her head. “It still happens. It’s just different. For all of us. If we stay here, if we leave, it doesn’t matter; if we let It live, we’re doomed.”

Richie’s heard enough to help himself to the bar, finds the nearest brown liquor, and pours himself a shot. “Why, though? How can you see it and we can’t? What separates you from the rest of us?” He downs his shot; it tastes like lighter fluid, but he pours himself another anyway.

Mike answers. “The Deadlights. She was the only one of us who was caught in them.”

“And it showed you us dying?” Eddie asks.

“Yeah.” 

There’s a silence that stretches and Richie has to be the one to break it. “So we come back in twenty-seven years and kill It then,” he says. It’s only partially a joke. He has no intention of ever coming back to this cursed fucking town.

“We’ll be seventy years old, asshole!” Eddie snaps at him, one hand shaking, the gesture familiar enough to be comforting for just a moment.

She turns to everyone; she looks frantic. “No matter where we go, It’s going to catch up to us. None of us make it another twenty years. Wherever we are, here, Derry, wherever, It’s marked us and It won’t stop until It’s dead.”

_We kill It or It kills every last one of us_.

Maybe it’s selfish that that’s the reason they agree to stay over, say, protecting a small New England town full of assholes, but it’s enough for now. Six people stay at the Derry House that night, as Mike tells them to be ready in the morning before going home.

\--

Richie wakes at a reasonable hour, having slept in most of his clothes and left his phone charging next to his bed. There are texts from his manager he’s decided to ignore in favor of coffee and whatever food he can scrounge up that will require the least amount of effort.

This turns out to mean walking across the street to a small corner shop that sells fresh coffee. He also gets a small bag of cashews to take with him. 

The cashier gives him an all-too familiar look that Richie would very much like to avoid, especially here and especially after a disastrous set (_thank God that shit wasn’t televised_) and says, “Hey, aren’t you..?”

“Beyoncé? No, but I get that a lot,” Richie says, paying as quickly as he can and leaving without waiting for his change. He finishes the cashews before reaching the hotel and tosses the bag in the trash outside, ready to pace a trench in his room waiting for Mike to come and collect them.

That’s when he gets a knock on his door, and sees Eddie, also in his clothes from the night before but still looking pristine. Richie briefly wonders if Eddie just has multiples of the same suburban-dad outfit before he steps out into the hallway.

“Hey, so…” Eddie has his hands in his pockets; his eyes are downcast. “Can I talk to you?”

“What’s up?” Richie asks. 

Eddie hesitates, then nods towards the balcony in at the end of the hallway before wordlessly walking off.

Richie follows, because of course he does. He’s ready to go wherever Eddie wants; if he has to face a demon clown then he wants all the time with Eddie Kaspbrak he can manage. 

They reach the balcony and for a moment Eddie says nothing. He pulls out his phone, contemplates it, tucks it back in his pocket. Richie doesn’t like silence, doesn’t like Eddie’s silence. Neither of them have ever been good with it.

Finally, Eddie says, “Not sure why I want to talk to _you _about this. You’ve never been married. Bill and Bev and Stan have, but…”

“Well fuck you, too, Eds,” Richie says, stung. Please don’t let it be something about Eddie wanting to start a family or something about his faceless wife. Richie’s willing to listen to a lot for the sake of Eddie’s company but he doesn’t want to have to suffer through this.

“Fuck _you_, Trashmouth,” Eddie replies, with no menace whatsoever behind it. He sighs and leans over the balcony railing. “You ever feel like if you’d remembered all this before, you could have saved yourself from a lifetime of mistakes?”

_Yes_. “How do you mean?”

Eddie looks down. “When I left Derry I forgot that the asthma, the meds, the allergies, they were all bullshit. Mom had lied to me to make me believe I was sick and needed her to isolate me from everyone and everything. When I knew this place, no matter how shitty it was, I still felt powerful after…after. Because if I could face down a serial killing monster clown, I could face anything, including her.”

Richie wants, more than anything to place his hand over Eddie’s as it begins to white-knuckle grip the railing. He sticks his hands in his pockets.

“And then we moved, and I started to forget. And she got back control of my life, and I went back to being scared of everything, susceptible to everything. Even when she died, I ended up marrying someone who does the same shit my mother used to. She’s exactly like her.”

Richie doesn’t know how to respond to any of this. How long’s it been since anyone’s opened up to him like this? How long has it been since he’s been alone in Eddie’s presence? His palms sweat and a lump is caught in his throat. He’s not…he’s _not good _with this sort of thing. He opens his mouth—to say what, he’s not sure. 

“Beep beep, Richie,” Eddie says before a sound comes out. “And I just told you my mother’s dead, so if you could lay off the jokes for a few seconds, that’d be great.”

“I would never. You mistake me for some sort of scoundrel,” Richie says, using his best RP British accent.

Eddie gives him a weary smile and glances back down. After a moment he straightens back up and reaches in his pocket for his phone.

“I swear to God, if you laugh or make a joke, I’m going to break your glasses,” Eddie warns him as he pulls up an image on his phone and hands it to Richie.

Richie sort of wishes Eddie _would_ break his glasses when he sees the picture, because at least then he wouldn’t know that Eddie’s wife looks exactly like his mother did twenty-seven years ago. Subtract the glasses and add a blonde wig, and they could’ve been twins. Richie stares over the phone at Eddie, who can’t look at him.

“Yeah, I know,” Eddie says, dejectedly, at Richie’s unspoken response.

“Please tell me you didn’t realize it when you married her,” Richie says. “Or not. I’m not sure which is worse.”

“_Shit_.” Eddie lets out a harsh laugh. “Fucking unbelievable.”

“Hey, I’m just calling it like I see it—”

“Not that,” Eddie says abruptly. After a moment, “I basically married my mother. She's never put me on meds I don't need, but otherwise it's like, how fucked up is that?”

“Like putting a fleshlight on the ceiling,” Richie says.

For a moment it seems Richie’s taken Eddie out of his pity party with sheer confusion because he squints at Richie, seemingly trying to form any chain of words before settling on, “_What?_”

Richie offers a little smile. “Y’know…_fucking up?_”

Eddie stares at him a moment longer before finally laughing. It’s the genuine article; Richie tries to memorize the smile lines that weren’t there before.

“That might be one of the dumbest jokes you’ve ever made,” Eddie says as he calms down. “Still better than your standup, though.”

“How’d you know it wasn’t really me?” Richie asks.

Eddie answers immediately. “Because you’re funnier in person. Always were. Even the fucking jokes about my mom. Your standup has none of your personality, none of your voices—”

“Ah, so you _did _like my voices. Thought they sounded like, and I quote, ‘just you, but worse.’”

Eddie, however, looks serious. “It has none of…_you_. Might as well be a bad impersonation of who you probably wanted to be back in college.”

“Well, Jesus, Eddie. That might be the nicest thing you’ve ever said to me,” Richie says.

Eddie doesn’t say anything for a moment. He looks back over the balcony. 

“If I make it back to New York I’m asking her for a divorce,” he says. “I can’t fucking do it anymore.”

“Apparently not, if you’re reduced to calling your wife ‘it.’ Sex with her that terrifying you’re comparing her to a psycho clown?”

“Oh, fuck you,” Eddie snaps. But he’s only annoyed for a second. He looks resolute.

Bill finds them. “Oh hey. There you are. M-m-mike’s here. We need to get going.”

Richie glances back at Eddie and wonders if he knows how terrified Richie is all the fucking time. He pulls out his phone and clears his throat. “So, y’know. If we _do_ make it out alive, we should keep in touch. Make sure we don’t forget each other this time.”

Eddie looks at him as though he expects Richie to make a _your mom_ joke, but none comes. 

“I’d like that,” he tells him, and they exchange numbers as they walk. Eddie’s horrified by the smudges on Richie’s screen. “Do you ever wipe that thing down?” he demands.

Richie gives him a blank stare. “Am I supposed to?” he asks.

Eddie’s free hand shakes as he—loudly--lectures Richie on how phones are gross carriers of disease. Richie laughs twice at Eddie and shakes his head as Eddie insists, “This has been scientifically backed up and…what the _fuck_ is so funny?”

And Richie thinks, _Yeah. I missed this._

They don’t realize how they look when they enter the lobby where everyone’s waiting. Bev giggles. Stan has a frustratingly knowing look.

“What?” Eddie asks.

Richie jerks his thumb at him. “Eddie thinks we should still be using carrier pigeons.”

“_What?_ No, I don’t. Asshole.”

Mike has a wry smile of his own as he says, “Alright. We’re rested so the work starts now. Let’s go.”

They stay quiet for all of fifteen seconds of walking before Eddie says quietly and furiously to Richie, “I live in _New York_, dipshit. I know how filthy and disgusting pigeons are.”

\---

God, he remembers this place. Ben had worked so hard to build it. Eddie had insisted it was a death trap even as he spent as much time as he could here, and Richie could hardly blame him for being so attached to the place. They all were.

Stan finds an old cannister filled with shower caps; he’d been worried about, as a thirteen-year-old kid, “getting spiders in your hair.” It was a fear that inspired most of the Losers to follow suit in the dumbest look the eighties ever produced. Richie turned them down. So did Eddie of all people, he remembers, though for the life of him he never figured out why. 

The hammock is still up; Richie’s crush had been in full swing for nearly three years by the time the clubhouse was built and both the best and excruciating part of his day had always been wrestling with Eddie for a good spot in the hammock. On the plus side? Get to be close to Eddie. Downside? Risk getting a boner. Richie always took his chances. And they always wound up sharing the hammock. After a certain point he’s pretty sure both he and Eddie came to think of it as theirs and theirs only.

Mike’s explaining that the clubhouse could help them regain some of their lost memories when Richie loses focus and starts wandering.

In hindsight he’ll wonder why he thought anyone would find it funny for him to do a Pennywise impression. Maybe because humor at a thing reduces fear of the thing itself? Probably not. Probably just wanted to see if Eddie would scream.

Not only does no one scream, there’s not even an outraged response. And Richie thinks his impression is pretty spot-on for someone who heard that voice only a few times, and has blocked out the memories for so long. And really, weren’t his jokes his greatest contribution? The fuck else does he have?

A bewildered Eddie asks, “Are you going to be like this the entire time we’re home?”

_Worst. Audience. Ever_. Richie thinks as everyone regains their composure and Mike explains the concept of tokens—things personal to them from around their first encounter with It. 

“And I thought starting here would jumpstart some of our memories, maybe give us a head start on finding them. I have mine. I think Stan may have found his,” he adds, nodding towards the shower cap Stan is slowly turning over in his hands.

Stan looks pensive. “Maybe,” he says, considering. “Can’t help but feel like I have unfinished business, though. Something’s missing.”

“Yes, and that leads me to my next point. Can everyone follow me?”

They start to head out; Ben gives one last look at the clubhouse. Mike, sweet Mike, notices. He smiles at Ben, says, “You did a great job on this place, Ben. It’s stayed intact for twenty-seven years. It’ll last a bit longer still.”

\---

“So Bill kicked your ass only once?” Eddie asks. They’re walking into town. Mike insisted that finding one’s token was a personal task to be accomplished alone, but that can’t mean that everything leading up to that has to be done alone, right? Right.

“He didn’t _kick my ass_. He just punched me.”

“You sure about that?”

“Yes! You weren’t there! Your mom had taken you to the hospital.”

Eddie groans. “Don’t fucking remind me. I was in the ER for nearly twelve hours. Mom kept screaming at the doctors that if they were professionals at all they could fix my arm without having to give me, and I quote, ‘cancer-causing X-rays.’”

They reach an intersection and Eddie stops. He glances behind him and takes a deep breath. “I think I know where I need to go,” he says.

Richie glances at him. “Yeah?”

Eddie hesitates. “Maybe.” Then, after a moment. “I’d preordered an inhaler before coming here. It’s at the pharmacy.”

“You don’t have asthma,” Richie says slowly.

Eddie snorts. “Yeah, I remember that _now._” He starts to turn around. “I…I know we said we shouldn’t split up, but…catch you in a few minutes?”

Richie shrugs. Whatever Eddie thinks he’s facing he doesn’t want Richie to see it. And Richie…he knows where he needs to be. “Yeah. Later.”

He remembers any time he didn’t spend in the Barrens or the quarry or the clubhouse that summer he spent at the arcade. Street Fighter was still new. If anything was personal to him that wasn’t to the other Losers, it was probably here.

He’s not surprised it’s shut down, nor that it’s unlocked; no one with any sense would have a use for this place as it is now. 

He pulls some loose change from his jacket and gets his token, remembers how they used to feel heavier in his palm.

And he remembers

He remembers he spent almost all his allowance here when he wasn’t speaking to the other Losers. Eddie’s mother intercepted phone calls and called Richie “a filthy, corrupting degenerate” (_Wouldn’t you just die all over again if you saw me now, Mrs. K_?) and spent time only sporadically with Stan. He remembers, skin prickling on his forearms, he _did_ try to make new friends during this time.

He remembers white-hot shame. And fear trickling down his back, fusing to him, keeping him frozen on the spot as Bowers screamed “_faggot_” at him in front of an audience of people who did…nothing. Maybe just eyed him with sickening curiosity, wondering, _Is it true? _or worse yet, knowing already. Thirteen-year-old Richie thought for a moment he might die on the spot; it’s not that Bowers’s crew hadn’t called the other boys similar things, but it was the humiliating _familiarity_ of it that had Richie almost physically sick. 

He forgot everything for a long time, but he’s never been able to forget that moment of, _How did he know? Who else knows? Am I going to die? _And fucking Trashmouth Tozier, king of never shutting up, fled without a word and wept bitterly until It caught him. Of course it had been easy for It to target him then; Richie had been primed on fear.

Current Richie, forty-year-old, closeted, still fucking terrified Richie holds his token and is left to wonder what’s changed. 

He stares a long time at the old Street Fighter machine. Thirteen years old and it wasn’t just the fucking clown that scarred him for life.

He steps outside, just like twenty-seven years ago when he’d broken into a run the moment he was out the door, straight to the park and the Paul Bunyan statue. God, that thing had fucked him up once upon a time. 

Part of him thinks he knows what he’s getting himself into. He knows It will catch up to him.

And It does, and knows how to fuck him up. It’s omniscient. It’s had twenty-seven years to prepare agonizingly specific, tailor-made ways to torture them. To torture _him_. It _loves_ this, as much as It can love anything. 

“_You wouldn’t want the others to know_,” It tells him.

“_I know your secret_,” It tells him. “_Your dirty little secret_.”

He can’t fucking do this.

He has Eddie’s and Stan’s numbers, and he’ll find a way to keep in touch with the other survivors. He’ll accept whatever gruesome death comes to him in the next decade. He just can’t face _this_.

\----

Ben opens Richie’s door without knocking.

“What the hell, man? I could’ve been jerking off,” Richie says, throat tight, and he doesn’t need Ben’s bemused look to know he’s not in a place for any of his jokes to land.

Ben puts his hands on his pockets. “Listen, Richie…”

“Nope.”

“I get it. I _understand._”

_Fat fucking chance_. Ben was bullied—severely—but for something that no longer applies to him. Richie doesn’t respond as he walks to his bathroom to pick up the toothbrush and travel-sized toothpaste he left.

“And you don’t have to tell me what It said to you, or did to you. You don’t have to tell me what you saw or remembered.”

Richie stops.

“And I know as much as anyone else that even if we didn’t have a serial killer clown to deal with, we’d still be working through some real fucking childhood trauma.” 

Richie comes back out. He doesn’t…he doesn’t _think _Ben knows. 

Ben seems to realize Richie doesn’t want to talk and continues, as though talking someone down from a ledge. “I still have the scar from when Henry Bowers tried to carve his name into me. For years I didn’t know where it come from.”

“And you want to stay in this shithole. One that tortured you.” Ben had been a sweet kid, and as an adult it seems he still is, but there’s no way he’s a martyr.

Ben shrugs. “I’d like to make this place a better place to live for any kid that might be going through what we went through, and I can’t do that if an actual monster is killing off kids left and right.”

“You don’t owe this town anything,” Richie tells him. “This place fucking sucked and we’re better off for having left. You can’t tell me Mike wouldn’t be happier and more successful if he’d left, too.”

Ben can’t refute Richie’s last point, but all the same he leans against the dresser. “Personally, I think I _do_ owe something to this town,” he says. “Without it, I wouldn’t have met you guys.”

Richie doesn’t say anything for a moment. He sits down. How long had Ben gone with no friends before the Losers had taken him in? Did he have friends before he moved here? He doubts it. “I think we were all each other had back then,” he says. “I mean, that’s how_ I_ was.”

Ben nods, looking achingly hopeful. “Yeah,” he says, grinning slowly. “You were a handful. But always fun. You knew how to lighten the mood, make everyone take things a little less seriously. It wouldn’t have been the same without you.”

The thing with Ben is that he was never much of a liar; Richie once asked him if he liked Bev, and Ben had responded by turning bright red and sputtering various denials before changing the subject to comic books, and current Ben, well. Current Ben still wears his heart on his sleeve and speaks honestly and carefully. He means what he said, and yeah, Richie’s touched.

“Thanks, Ben,” Richie says, and he too means it.

Ben shrugs it off. “I think, even when we couldn’t remember each other, some part of us still missed each other,” he says.

Richie thinks about Eddie, then tries not to think about Eddie.

Ben hesitates. “Are you feeling better? Did any of this help? I know it’s all terrifying and way too much, but. I think we were the ones who fought It for a reason. It couldn’t have been anyone other than us, y’know?”

“Yeah, yeah.” Richie says absently. He knows Ben means well. He always means so well. “I, uh. I just need a minute to process what I saw earlier.”

“Right, of course.” Ben cautiously heads for the door. “And I meant it, you’re not obligated to say anything, but don’t feel like you can’t. We’re all here for you, you know?”

Richie looks at Ben, and says, “Yeah, I know.”

He watches Ben’s small smile and waits until after Ben’s closed the door and the sound of his boots have dissipated before he grabs his duffel bag and heads for the terrace exit.

_I’m sorry, Ben, but I’m not like you_, Richie thinks. _I’m a fucking coward and if everyone finds out, they’ll know how I feel Eddie and Eddie will hate me and I think I would rather die than live with Eddie’s hatred so…so long and thanks for all the fish and all that but I’m gone._

“I’ve got dates in fucking Reno,” he reminds himself as he drives. Maybe Bev’s right about all of them dying early. Maybe he’ll die onstage next week, crushed by a lighting fixture or shot in the head by a disgruntled audience member. Wouldn’t that be a way to go, he thinks, as he passes storefronts and the pharmacy and then sees the synagogue Stan used to attend. And running out of it, Stan.

Richie stops the car as Stan slows down and sees him. He freezes as Richie gets out. 

“You okay?” Richie asks, knowing the answer. How could _any_ of them be okay right now?

Stan huffs a sharp breath; it sounds almost like a sob as he runs both hands through his hair, pacing in front of the synagogue. Richie approaches him slowly, forgetting Reno and forgetting his escape.

Stan’s birthday is coming up, isn’t it? The Losers weren’t talking around that time, but Richie didn’t want to leave Stan alone. He’d been the only Loser who’d attended Stan’s Bar Mitzvah. Stan had made a hell of a speech, then. Caused quite a stir with everyone, got himself in trouble with his father, and dropped an F bomb in temple before making a dramatic exit and Richie remembers being prouder of Stan than he’d ever been in his life. 

Current Stan is shaking as he says, perhaps just to himself, “I should’ve fucking died.”

“_What?_”

“I should’ve fucking killed myself before I got you all killed. I should’ve...” he turns around, one hand covering his eyes, then letting out another harsh breath as he slides his hand down his face, covering his mouth.

Richie doesn’t know what to do. He can’t…he doesn’t provide comfort or emotional stability. Never learned how. He wants to tell Stan how much he admires him, how happy he is to see him, how it’s good Stan is here. “Did you see the hot lady in the painting again?” he asks.

Stan snorts but doesn’t turn around. “I distinctly remember telling you she_ wasn’t_ hot,” he says.

“Wanna talk in the car?” Richie offers. 

“_Of course_ you’d rent a red sportscar just for a weekend trip to Derry,” Stan says as he slowly turns around. 

“Well, you know me. I’m kind of a dick.”

“I remember.” Stan looks at the car, then at Richie. “You saw something too, I gather?”

Richie takes a deep breath. “Wanna talk in the car?” he asks again.

Stan glances behind him at the synagogue. His father had been Rabbi there, had put the pressure on Stan something fierce. He closes the door and follows Richie to the car.

Neither of them speak for a moment.

Richie doesn’t like silence. “You wanna grab coffee? Go to the deli? It’ll be a while before Mike needs us in the library.”

“Not right now, I’m good.” Stan sighs and lightly smacks the back of his head against the rest.

“Did you see something?”

Stan says nothing.

“Don’t take this the wrong way, man, but between this and talking about killing yourself you’re starting to freak me out.”

Stan sighs. “When Mike called, what did you remember?”

Richie shrugs. “I remembered that I knew him. Remembered being an unpopular kid who was friends with a bunch of other unpopular kids. Remembered being bullied and commiserating over it with my friends. Remembered…” he doesn’t need to mention how he remembered Eddie. Any case, he knows what Stan’s asking. “I remembered that there was something fucked up about the town. I didn’t remember what it was, just how I’d felt.”

Stan nods to himself. “When I got the call, I remembered everything,” he says. “One minute I’m making vacation plans with my wife, the next thing I know I have all these new memories of some omniscient demon that killed dozens of people in the space of one year alone and almost got us. And I knew I couldn’t handle it.”

“Clearly you could,” Richie says, and Stan’s already shaking his head.

“You don’t get it,” he says. “I was scared to come back, was scared of getting you all killed if I didn’t, because Pennywise only lost because he was up against all of us and I…_fuck_.” He rubs the heels of his palms against his eyes. “Maybe if I’d died you’d have a better shot.”

“_How?_” Richie asks. “How would we benefit…how would _anyone _be better off if you were dead? Only person I can think of who’d be happier with that is Pennywise, and we’re trying to kill that fucker.”

Stan doesn’t look at him. He closes his eyes. “I was always the weakest one,” he says.

“Bullshit,” Richie tells him. Stan…Stan had always been cautious, fastidious, nervous, not unlike Eddie, but quieter. He didn’t talk about it when he was upset. “There wasn’t a weak one among us. We wouldn’t be alive today if there was.”

Stan snorts and says nothing.

Richie glances back at the synagogue. “Remember your Torah reading? When you said you’d always be a fucking loser and stormed out? Yeah.” Richie smiles at him. “Took some serious balls. Don’t think I’ve ever been prouder of you.”

Stan lets a grin tug at the corners of his mouth for just a second. “Yeah. Dad never really forgave me for that.” He looks straight ahead. “I didn’t even really remember any of what I did for a long time and he was still furious with me until the end.”

“That’s his problem,” Richie says immediately. 

Stan considers Richie, and Richie suddenly feels quite warm; he taps his fingers nervously on the steering wheel. Stan sees something the others don’t. He knows oh God he knows he knows he knows

“What are you scared of?” he asks. His voice is gentle.

_he knows_

Richie scoffs. “Clowns. Obviously. What else could it be?”

Stan gives a soft _hmm_. Then, after a moment, “Are you happy?”

Richie wants to say, _Well, gee. Am I happy that I’m making more money than I ever imagined making people laugh for a living? Am I happy that I get to travel the world telling dick jokes?_

What comes out is, “_Is anyone_?”

“I am,” Stan says. “At least I _was_, before getting roped back into all this.” He hesitates. It seems like he’s choosing his words carefully, before discarding them all and trying again. And soon Richie realizes why.

“I don’t think,” he says slowly, “that you need to be afraid. Not after what you’ve seen and been through. Not after all of this. And as long as the seven of us are friends, I don’t think any of us would ever treat you like less of a person.”

_If you came out,_ Stan doesn’t say, and doesn’t need to.

Richie doesn’t cry; he lifts his glasses and rubs at his eyes with the heel of his palm, but he doesn’t cry. He doesn’t look back at Stan, doesn’t—he can’t say it. There’s more to it than Stan realizes. Or maybe Stan does, but it’s…

“You okay?” Stan asks.

“I don’t fucking know,” Richie says honestly.

Stan drops it then. He must remember Richie enough to know when to leave it well alone, and says absently. “I hope if we make it out alive we don’t forget this time. I think it’ll help if we remember. Maybe it’ll help Eddie. Hope it helps Bev with that piece of shit she calls a husband.”

“What?” Richie is immediately taken out of himself. “What d’you mean?”

Stan looks back at him with his brow furrowed. “You didn’t notice?”

“Notice _what_?”

Stan sits up. “Bev’s wrists. They were covered in bruises from the moment we met at the restaurant. And she wasn’t wearing a ring but she mentioned how her husband was her business partner like she was terrified of him.”

“I…” Richie thinks back; he remembers being happy to see her, thought she seemed successful. Maybe he was just too caught up in remembering a thirty-year crush to actually take stock of how everyone was. “I didn’t notice the bruises,” he admits.

“Yeah, well. She was wearing long sleeves for a reason.”

“So she escaped her dad but married a man just like him.” _So two of the Losers ran off and married carbon copies of their shitty, abusive parents,_ Richie doesn’t say. Bev—Bev had always seemed much stronger and more mature than they were; more mature than_ he_ was, anyway. And more effortlessly _cool _than Richie could ever hope to be; even now, making a living out of being charismatic to some and obnoxious to others, he can’t quite get on her level. He wonders how much of it was some sort of defense mechanism for her. With the right poise and precisely-timed wit, you’d never guess she had any fears. Maybe that’s part of why he’s freaking out now; she has no illusions over how fucked up everything is and hasn’t tried to act like everything’s A-okay. He finds he’s furious, disgusted that after all this, if Bev makes it out alive with everything she’s been through, that she’ll still have to deal with that fucking husband. And he finds he doesn’t want her to have to go through it alone.

“Yeah,” Stan says. “Almost like losing our memories of this place robbed us being able to understand and work through our trauma and just keep reliving it. Or something.”

After a moment, he adds, “Actually, I’m up for eating something while we aren’t actively running for our lives. And we might not get a chance later. Wanna check and see if Kenny’s is still running?”

Kenny’s was a sub shop that sold questionable sandwiches in grease-lined wrappers and was a favorite weekend spot for high school students. It’s still there, and still gross. They eat in the car and Richie asks Stan about his life. Stan tells him about Patty, and when he does a genuine smile graces his features.

“I feel like you guys would like her. And she’d like you, I think. We’ve been together through a lot. She knows what it’s like to grow up in a small, shitty town. She and I kind of joke, sometimes, y’know, about how we were among the only Jewish kids at our schools and counted down the days until we could leave for greener pastures.”

“You were gonna leave us?” Richie asks, pressing a hand to his chest. “I’m wounded.”

“So were you!” Stan says, laughing. “And you left before I did, if I recall.”

“Yeah, to be an actor, and then to get paid to stand onstage and talk about my dick for a living.”

“Thirteen-year-old Richie would be amazed to know he could do that.”

“Thirteen-year-old me would be disgusted with me now,” Richie says without thinking. 

Stan looks over at him with eyebrows raised. “You really think that?” he asks.

“No. I mean.” Richie glances over at Stan, then back down at the remainders of the sub he’s mostly demolished. “I don’t fucking know.”

They settle in Richie’s rental, food wrappers neatly deposited in the larger paper bag. 

“We should head back,” Stan says finally.

Richie glances back at Stan and wonders if he knows how close Richie was to leaving. Maybe. He seems to know every other damn thing. “Yeah,” he agrees. “Then I guess we’ll all meet Mike at the library.”

There’s all of ten minutes of calm, using the bathroom and wondering when the last time the place was renovated before heading back into the lobby, and what Richie sees Bev, Ben, and Eddie sitting there and the bandage covering Eddie’s left cheek; there’s a large blood bloom in the center of it. He feels sick, and swallows down the bile rising in his throat, the numbness and constant chatter of _Eddie’s hurt Eddie’s hurt Eddie’s hurt_ enough to ask, “First time shaving?”

Eddie’s about to retort when Stan comes downstairs after him and speaks for Richie, with his hand on his shoulder as he asks, “What happened here?”

“Bowers,” Eddie says. “Whatever nuthouse they sent him to, he’s out and he’s trying to hunt us down.”

“We think Pennywise sent him,” Ben adds. “Almost seems like he’s possessed—Eddie managed to stab him in the chest and he just pulled it out like it was a splinter before disappearing.”

Richie turns to Eddie, who still looks pale and shaken. “You did? Before or after he stabbed you in the fucking face?”

Eddie tenderly plays at the edges of his bandage. “After. I thought it would stop him. He said it _was my time_.”

“The fuck does that mean?”

“Means Pennywise is outsourcing? I don’t know, I don’t speak crazy.” Eddie’s changed his shirt and Richie wonders, trying not to panic, how bad the blood must have gotten. Eddie is calmer than Richie initially expected, but he remembers, then, that this_ Eddie_, and Eddie can be as tough and ferocious as the rest of them when the situation calls for it. This is the same Eddie who as a thirteen-year-old, rushed Pennywise, screaming, “_I’m gonna kill you!_” with no weapon on his person. Of course he had it in him to respond to being stabbed in the face by pulling the knife out and stabbing his assailant with it. Richie doesn’t have time to tell Eddie he’s proud of him because they have to head to the library, and warn Mike and Bill of what else is coming.

Stan gets there first, Richie right behind him, and they have half a second to process that Bowers—_much older but with the same hairstyle, weird_\--beat both of them here, that he’s shattered several display cases filled with decorative weapons, and that he’s straddling Mike with his knife poised to strike.

Stan’s the one who reaches for the hand ax, which is lucky because the loose club Richie picks up is unwieldy as fuck, and it’s the last thought he has before Stan plants what has to be a very dull blade directly into the back of Bowers’s skull and hears the sickening crack of bone and the . He thinks he hears Stan scream and immediately back away, stumbling, staring down at his hands and back at the body that Mike is trying to push off of him. Richie feels himself sway as the stench of blood fills the air and he speaks feebly, not hearing his own voice.

“Well, that was overdue,” he thinks he says, and sees both Stan and Mike turn to look at him incredulously. Richie would like to explain the joke but instead finds himself puking for the second time in forty-eight hours.

_Just like college. Or tour_, he thinks, as everyone else comes spilling in. He hears that Bill has gone to kill Pennywise himself, like the brave fucking idiot he is, that he’s headed in the direction they need to go anyway: that fucking nightmare house. 

\--

Richie knows, rationally, that Bill is defending him, looking out for him, but he’s fucking pissed. What the fuck makes Bill think screaming at and guilt-tripping Eddie could actually help him? Help_ any _of them?

More than anything Richie hates Eddie’s horrible dead mother and his shitty wife for thinking they were protecting Eddie from himself the idea that he _wasn’t _weak, the idea that he possessed any inner strength, because they, oh they just _knew_ he couldn’t be his own goddamn person.

Seeing Eddie look just as frightened of Bill as he was of the spider hurts more than Richie expected. He _knows_ Eddie froze up. He was there, after all, nearly getting face-hugged by a spider bearing Georgie’s face as Stan, Bev, Mike, and Ben fought some other nightmare on the other side of the door. He knows, and he doesn’t care. Bill screams at Eddie about how Richie could’ve died.

_I _didn’t_ die_, t_hough_, Richie wants to say. _I’m alive and we can fucking move on_. 

Bill finally calms down when Eddie manages to speak, voice small, “Please don’t be mad at me, Bill.” Richie starts to get up; Bev puts a hand on his shoulder to keep him from crossing over to Eddie, who says, “_I was just scared_.”

Richie can see Bill’s anger dissipate; whatever survivor’s guilt he seems to want to take out on Eddie fades, and Richie’s grateful for it. 

Eddie has more than enough self-doubt, even after everything he’s been through. Even as he’s wading through what he still calls “grey water” (“_basically piss and shit!_”) in the sewers under the world’s most cursed house, he thinks he’s a coward.

“I’m going to get us all killed,” he tells them. And that, that’s bad enough, but it’s when he pulls out his fucking non-functioning inhaler that Richie’s had enough. He can’t let Eddie let himself think he’s useless, or weak, or anything other than the man who’s endured more than anyone outside the seven of them could possibly imagine, and he’s completely serious as he gives what he hopes is the pep talk Eddie needs. One hand on Eddie’s shoulder, one look into those big sad eyes, and he can’t help but feel warmth spread through his cheeks and a smile tugging at the corner of his mouth.

_I love you_, he thinks. “You’re braver than you think,” he says. 

And he does. He’s only remembered him for forty-eight hours after forgetting him for decades and he loves him. He knew it as a kid and he knows it now, and the knowledge somehow doesn’t terrify him as they complete and fail the ritual, as the two of them are separated from the others.

_I’ve been in love with you for thirty years, even when I couldn’t remember you, and we’re both going to make it out of here alive, and I don’t want to be stuck in a nightmare sewer maze with anyone else._

He keeps thinking it as Pennywise repeatedly fucks with them like the omniscient asshole It is, sending them through traps (_a closet? Really? Now you’re just being petty_) and Eddie announces, “Next time we go regular scary!” as though they’re making vacation plans.

\--

Richie remembers It was about to kill Mike and was taken back to twenty-seven years earlier and a certain rock war. He remembers taunting It, and remembers being hit in the face with…something. Perhaps he has a concussion, because he’s lying on the cold stone and his back and head are killing him.

Eddie leans over him; bright-eyed, brilliant, fucking beautiful in his triumph, announcing, “I think I killed it for real!”

Richie laughs, breathless with relief, and reaches for Eddie; he cups the uninjured side of Eddie’s face. “Knew you could do it,” he tells Eddie, still stunned. He could lean up now, wants to lean up and kiss him _right now_

and then he hears this sickening _rip_ping noise, tastes blood in his mouth, and sees Eddie’s face, suddenly pale and blood streaming from his mouth and

_Oh God_

_Oh God no_

_No, please no_

It has him, claw through his torso like a metal spike, and Eddie looks at Richie with such fucking heartbreaking confusion.

“_Richie?_”

His voice is so small, sounds so lost

“_Eddie?_” His glasses oh god his glasses are stained with Eddie’s blood and Eddie’s being lifted, hoisted up and thrown like a fucking rag doll

They find him bleeding through with a fucking giant hole gouged through him and there’s so much blood, coming from his chest, his mouth, and Richie tries, he tries to staunch the bleeding as Eddie grows paler, looks weaker and tells them—he tells them how to kill It. Eddie saves them. He saves _him_. Eddie’s so fucking brave and he’s never realized it and Richie can’t lose him. He can’t lose him when he’s only just gotten him back, when there’s so much he wants to say to him.

And Eddie oh God

He’s so cold, so still

He needs help. He won’t make it if they don’t get the fuck out of here and fast. They killed It, but Richie can’t celebrate without Eddie, wouldn’t have made it without him so they need to get him out of here

His eyes are glassed over; he doesn’t respond as Richie cups his face in his hands. No wince as Richie touches his injured cheek. No response no matter how many times Richie murmurs his name.

_Please, not him. I’ll do anything, just please don’t take him away from me. _

“_He’s dead_.”

They defeated an interdimensional clown and Richie’s supposed to believe there’s no way he can revive Eddie? 

He doesn’t, can’t believe it. Richie scoops Eddie into his arms and there’s no heartbeat, no pulse. He shakes as he holds him close. The others want him to let go but he can’t oh god he can’t…

From there a gaping chasm opens where his heart once was, tearing through him and leaving nothing unbroken and unbent. Sobs start in his chest and wrack his body as they pull him away from Eddie. He tries, he tries so hard to stay. He fights and he screams, the noise reverberating through the caverns they can’t leave him. They can’t just leave him alone in that cursed place they can’t

His voice is torn as he screams one last time; the house has collapsed and Eddie’s stuck in the worst fucking place imaginable and

_I lost him again_

_I lost him for good_

“Rich? Richie?” Eddie pats the side of Richie’s face and grins, eyes bright as Richie lifts his head—he’s on the ground, Eddie crouched above him. “There he is! That’s it, buddy!”

He doesn’t have time to say anything else before Richie grabs Eddie’s shoulders, pulls him down, and flips them over once, twice, over unforgiving stone. It knocks the wind out of them both.

“_Ow!_ What the fuck, Rich!” is what Eddie manages to say right before Its massive claw strikes mere inches away from them and sends debris flying, the sound piercing and the impact making Richie’s jaw rattle. He hears Eddie scream and scramble up, taking Richie’s hand as he stands. “_What the fuck! It was dead!”_

Richie doesn’t have time to contradict him. He keeps Eddie’s hand in his and heads for the narrow passage It had sent Eddie. He has enough sense to glance over his shoulder at the others, shouting, “Come on! This way!”

He’s working on adrenaline and the knowledge that they can kill It without a ritual and without any outside help and they just need a little time. It didn’t give him explicit instructions, but knowing the possibility of victory exists is all he needs right now.

He doesn’t realize he’s still gripping Eddie’s hand tight as he speaks or that part of him is chanting, _no blood no blood no blood_ as he glances back at him. All that’s staining Eddie’s formerly pristine white shirt is grey water, and all seven of them are standing here ready to fight. It’s fine. They can all still make it.

And Eddie, brave, beautiful, still very-much-alive Eddie, comes up with the idea of condensing it down to size. Make It small.

Mike’s the one who comes up with the idea of making It _believe_ It’s small, and from there. From there the vitriol is easy. He hears Stan beside him call It “a stupid fucking clown with stupid fucking pom poms” and almost laughs. 

None of this should be possible; It shouldn’t exist, not in this realm or any other, and they shouldn’t be able to stop, especially not like this.

Maybe, though, it’s always supposed to have been them, here and now after decades of hiding how terrified they were, crushing Its heart, just like Ben said. All seven of them, the saviors of this shitty town.

\--

“I want to go on the record as saying that I think it’s a bad idea for me to go swimming in filthy water when I have a bleeding wound on my face,” Eddie says, even as he takes off his hoodie.

“Noted and ignored,” Richie says beside him.

In the water, Bev offers Richie a little smile.

“Doing okay?” she asks.

Richie glances at Eddie, who—is somehow _toned_, if the way his shirt clings to his body is anything to go by. Why is Eddie toned? Madness. And his hair, now loose from its neat hold, curls over his forehead, and he looks so painfully handsome Richie would be tongue-tied if he’d said anything for the past five minutes. Bev must be worried about that, but he can’t say anything because

Because he fell all over again for the first boy he ever loved—only person he can ever remember being in love with, isn’t that depressing?—and that man died, bled out in Richie’s arms, and now that man is alive and mostly well, and Richie needs some time to get the images out of his head.

“Yeah, yeah. Great.” Richie runs a hand through his hair and sighs. “How about you?” He glances at Bev’s forearms, the fading bruises. “Is…_that_…?”

Bev looks down at her arms, then back at Richie with a look that communicates, in a way only Bev ever could, that she appreciates his concern but not his deflecting. “He and I are over. Whatever happens with the company, I’m not going back to him and he knows it.”

“Good.” Richie pauses, then adds. “You know you deserve to be happy, right?” 

Bev smiles—soft and sad and it’s enough that Richie slowly pulls her into a hug. “Finally starting to, I think,” she says against Richie’s shoulder. She pulls away. She says, “_Are _you okay, though?” and hesitates before adding, “You know, I know what the Deadlights can do to a person.”

Richie deflates. “You saw everyone die,” he says. The worst thing Bev could imagine, he figures. A grim warning of things to come of It had its way. 

Bev nods. “You too?” she asks.

Richie glances to where Eddie’s standing, wincing in disgust as he wrings out his shirt. “No,” he says.

Bev follows his gaze and her eyes widen. “_Oh, sweetie_,” she says softly, and rubs his shoulder. “You know, none of what we saw came true. For either of us, you know? It’s gone now.”

“I know,” he says. And rationally he does; they all managed to kill It. Derry will start to gain some semblance of a normal small New England town and its inhabitants will never know or understand what went down. There’s something peaceful in the morning air but that doesn’t mean some part of Richie doesn’t feel haunted still. Doesn’t mean he can look at Eddie and not see, clear is if it was real, the gaping wound in his chest or his glassy, unseeing eyes.

Eddie, the Eddie that’s here now and survived to complain another day, speaks up. “So as much as I can enjoy bathing in dirty water, I really should get to a hospital and get this stitched up by a professional,” he says, pointing to his cheek.

“I can drive you,” Richie says before Mike can offer. _Sorry, Mike_, the thinks. _At least you’ll finally get some rest._

Mike doesn’t object; no one does. Richie gets the feeling that one some level, they all realize he needs to be alone with Eddie.

Eddie grins at him. “I won’t object to you being my chauffeur,” he says. “But I also need to shower ASAP because I feel fucking disgusting. And you need to shower because you _smell_ fucking disgusting.”

\--

Eddie uses Richie’s shower. His own has the torn shower curtain; he cleans off the bloodstains before grabbing his toiletries and a change of clothes and marching into Richie’s suite. He's taken off his hoodie and his stained shirt has remained in one piece.

“You alright?” Eddie asks. Richie looks up at him, at the place where Pennywise had gored a hole through him, and then at Eddie's face. He looks about as exhausted as Richie feels, but no more hurt. _He's alive. He's okay. He's still here._

“I’m fine,” he says. It sounds more like a cough than actual speech, but it’s good enough for Eddie.

“Thanks for this, by the way,” Eddie tells him. He’s clearly tired—so very, very tired—but Richie doesn’t want to tempt himself with the image of Eddie in Richie’s—_not Richie’s, the hotel’s_—shower, after seeing him earlier, but at the same time.

It was real. Eddie was dead. Eddie was fucking shishkabobed and there was so much blood and he was cold and lifeless in Richie’s arms before the others forced him to…

He takes a deep breath, remembers what Bev told him, and goes downstairs.

Mike is nursing a coffee in the sitting area, with several more on the coffee table in front of him. He raises his cup in salute as Richie smiles at him.

“Ben picked it up. He got a couple for you and Eddie if you want any. Bill’s flying out in a couple of hours. Ben and Bev are heading out tonight. Stan said he’s staying one more night to help me out with some things.”

Richie grabs a coffee for himself and takes a seat across from him. There’s a comfort in the silence that follows. He normally hates it; he needs to fill the void with noise, with something. It’s always awkward and empty but not here. Here it feels…companionable. Like, well, two old, exhausted friends who don’t need to say anything.

But Richie does anyway. “So, what’s next for Mike Hanlon?” he asks.

Mike considers this over his coffee. “I was thinking of moving,” he said. “I’ve lived here forty years, spent twenty-seven of them preparing for something that’s over now, and…” he takes a sip. “I don’t have any ties left. No obligations, not really.”

“You still thinking of Florida?”

Mike smiles. “You remember that.

“And yeah, I’ve been thinking about it. Didn’t research where to live there as extensively as I did Derry’s history, but I’m thinking Daytona.”

“Daytona?” Richie asks. “Did you become a Nascar fan while we were away?”

Mike laughs. Even with the exhaustion, he seems younger, less weighted down. “Not a chance. No. It’s just close enough to the beaches and to tourist areas that I can make a day trip of either one whenever I want but far away enough that it’s affordable and not a traffic nightmare.”

“Still going to be a librarian?”

“Probably,” Mike says. “I have a degree in library sciences.”

“Ah. I have a degree in…nothing. Actually. Dropped out of NYU my junior year. Didn’t even realize that Bev and Eddie were nearby, but I don’t think I’d have recognized them if I saw them.”

Mike nods in agreement. “I did see some familiar asshats at University of Maine in Orono. At least I had some context to them calling me a Loser. Thank God I commuted instead of dealing with them twenty-four-seven on campus.”

“Orono? That’s, like, over an hour’s drive.” More, during the summer when tourists want to visit the lobster-fishing areas.

Mike, of course, knows this. “I couldn’t live outside of Derry,” he says. “I couldn’t forget.”

Richie sits, stunned for a moment. Mike told him, of course. That night at dinner. “_I never left_.” But he’d been so pissed off then, hadn’t really comprehended it. Just how much Mike has sacrificed for them, for this town filled with assholes who’d never know it. He doesn’t have a name for the combination of shame and gratitude that bubbles in his stomach as he looks at Mike.

“I don’t…” he clears his throat. “I don’t want to forget this time,” he says. 

Mike gives him a look, and Richie wonders how transparent he’s become. “I’m not sure we_ will _forget this time,” he says. “It’s dead, so whatever curse or sickness It set here is gone with It.”

“How do you know?”

Mike shakes his head. “I don’t. Not for certain, anyway. I guess I can call Bill when he’s out of the area, see if I need to jog his memory or not. And I have everyone’s numbers I’ll make into a group chat, if everyone’s up for it. You headed out tonight or…?”

“Tomorrow,” Richie says. “I have job obligations, performance dates, all that bullshit.” He adds, “I don’t know about Eddie; he probably needs to get back to his job as a professional buzzkill.”

Mike snorts and takes a sip of coffee. “Seeing you two argue was usually the entertainment of the day for me,” he says. “It’s nice of you to take him to the hospital, by the way.”

“Ah, well. I need to get a new pair of glasses anyway,” Richie says, absently taking off his current, cracked pair and examining them. In the Deadlights, he recalls they were spattered with Eddie’s blood. He shakes his head, as if to dislodge the thought. “At least I have a spare in my bag.”

Mike _hmms_ over his coffee. “I’ll let you take your shower; I should probably head home and clean up too.

“By the way, Bev and I were thinking of doing a small take-out dinner here around six before she and Ben head out. Will you let Eddie know?”

“Yeah, yeah. Of course.” Richie smiles and sets his coffee down as he stands—before he knows it, Mike is standing, too. And Richie’s walking around the coffee table to pull him into a hug.

“Thank you, Mike,” he says, so quietly Mike inhales sharply before returning the hug so fiercely the air is almost knocked out of Richie’s lungs.

\--

Richie comes back to his room with a cup of lukewarm coffee for Eddie just as Eddie emerges from the bathroom with only a towel around his waist and his dirty clothes and toiletries under one arm and Richie has to glance away. He’s noticed that Eddie changed out the bandage on his cheek and his hair is damp and Richie’s thirteen once again, trying not to check out his closest friend. He wordlessly pushes the coffee cup at Eddie.

“Thanks,” Eddie says, and takes a sip before wincing at the temperature.

“Yeah, well, if you’d taken a shorter amount of time, it would’ve been warmer,” Richie says before rifling through his duffle bag. He has a clean change of pants, shirt, and socks, but not boxers, which means commando, which means trouble. He takes advantage of the lack of eye contact and adds, “You get into crossfit or something?” Truly, Richie is baffled to see Eddie at forty is in better shape than Richie was at any point in his life. 

Eddie snorts. “Not fucking likely,” he says. “Those idiots injure themselves all the time. Bad form and overextension all over the place.” He takes another sip, winces again, and adds, “Ready in twenty?”

“Yeah. Yeah, sure.” He glances back up in time to see Eddie start to head back to his room, and adds, “Bev suggested we all meet for a Loser’s Dinner at six before we all scatter to the wind. Bill’s going to miss it, but wasn’t sure if you’d still be here. You game?”

Eddie nods, slowly, a small smile spreading across his face. “Yeah, yeah, I’ll be here,” he says. “I’d…yeah. Looking forward to it.”

\--

Richie is so exhausted he feels the weight of all this _fucking_ town and its shared trauma in his bones as he shuts his eyes under the faucet

and is greeted with the image of Eddie, his chest hollowed out, blood dripping from the corners of his mouth, eyes glazed over…

“_Fuck. Fuck. Shit._” He takes a deep breath and steadies himself.

_Tell him, Richie_, a voice tells him; it sounds more like Stan than it does himself. _He won’t hurt you, but _you_ will if you keep doing this to yourself. Tell him._

In another lifetime, Richie is showering Eddie’s blood off him, wondering what may have been, wondering how the fuck he can go on living a life without Eddie in it. Richie’s caught glimpses of that timeline.

He glances down at his hand, where there used to be an ugly slash crossing his palm, and the source of which he forgot for so long; he has joked more than once that it was from masturbating with a butterfly knife taped to his dick. He thinks of a pair of initials carved into a bridge at the edge of town, made by a terrified, lovestruck kid and wonders if that declaration is still there. He hopes it is; if he is to…if he is to _tell Eddie_, he knows how he wants to do it.

\---

Richie sits in the waiting room, watching his portable charger bring his phone up to a usable level and glancing through all the mixed texts from his manager, at the missed calls. He’s vaguely aware of the fact that his career has hit a “snag” and is almost surprised by how little he cares—he’d had nothing but his career for years—when he sees empty threats from his manager. Amazing how facing an interdimensional monster can lend some perspective. He puts in an order for a replacement pair of glasses so he can still keep a spare and sends his manager a text saying he’ll meet him in Reno in five days, no problem. But he’d like to start writing his own material again, and is going to need to stay in Maine for another day to tie up some loose ends, and imagines his manager having an aneurism back in his office. He smirks at his phone and only the sight of Eddie emerging, bandage fixed, can improve his mood.

“Good?” Richie asks.

Eddie offers a small smile as he says, “I’ll tell you in the car. I need to hit up the pharmacy anyway.”

“Yeah, me too.” They get to the car when Eddie finally speaks.

“So I told the doctor I slipped and fell in the shower, and he was like, ‘Really. There was a knife in your shower? Because that’s clearly a knife wound.’ And I didn’t know how to answer him. How could I explain Bowers and everything in the hotel? Because that would lead to what happened in the library, right? And he goes on to mention that—you remember some of the killings got pinned on Bowers, right? Not just his father?”

“Yeah, I remember. I think they pinned him for Hockstetter, didn’t they?”

“Right. So. Bowers broke out of a mental institution by killing two employees with a knife, and, well. I guess the Derry Police Department isn’t really interested in bringing his killer to justice, because the paper said his death was ruled a suicide.”

Richie glances over at Eddie, whose eyebrows are raised. “They’re saying he stuck a hand axe in the back of his own head?”

Eddie shrugs and plugs his phone into the car’s charger.

“Of course Derry would be the one town in which police incompetence is a good thing. Stan will be relieved.”

Richie goes into the pharmacy and picks up both prescriptions while Eddie is on his phone; Richie knows he’s getting in touch with his wife and figures Eddie should have a little privacy. Especially if Eddie still means what he said yesterday.

He wordlessly hands Eddie his bag of antibiotics as Eddie stares down at his phone. Eddie glances up at him.

“Can I tell you something?” he asks.

“Yeah, of course,” Richie tells him. 

Eddie twiddles his thumb against his phone for a second. “Myra and I have been on the rocks for a while. For the past year things have been pretty rough, but...well. You get married, you accept that it's going to be difficult sometimes. You don't get divorced just because you only agree on what you're both scared of, or because you never have sex or even want to. That's the coward's way out. You stay together because it's better to be together and all that."

_What the fuck_, Richie thinks as he nods along.

" Then Mike called me. And that kind of broke the camel's back. Got into a huge fight. She was livid when I said I had to leave for a few days. I should’ve told her it was for work; I mean, she hates it when I travel for work, too. Hates not being able to keep tabs on me and tell me what I’m doing wrong or how I’m going to hurt myself. But when I said I needed to go back to my childhood hometown, meet some old friends, she flipped. I'm not saying I wasn't being weird--hell, I don't know if I'd react well if I was married to someone who out of the blue crashed the car and then said they'd have to go away for a few days, but I started remembering stuff. I remembered how much I hated being treated like I was weak and needed a fucking guardian all the time telling me how dumb and reckless I was."

He ducks his head, closes his eyes before trying to chuckle, nervous. “Sorry. I shouldn’t be annoying you with this,” he says, and that alarms Richie more than anything Eddie’s just said. Eddie isn’t bashful around him, doesn’t apologize to him for talking, doesn’t try to hide himself. Eddie has never had to be the timid boy his mother made him out to be for Richie, and he doesn’t have to pretend to be some mild-mannered, timid man for Richie now. He’ll never have to censor himself for him, and Richie needs him to know that.

“You’re not annoying me,” Richie says. “Keep going. You had something else?”

Eddie shoots him a grateful smile and collects himself. “I already told you my marriage is fucked and always has been. I didn’t tell you she, uh. She told me not to come back until I came to my senses, and I couldn’t say it to her but I knew I already had. I came back to my senses when I left for Derry. And now,” he holds up his phone, “I just listened to a few messages from her. One accusing me of cheating on her, one accusing me of being gay, one accusing both. So, uh, I think I have an important call I need to make before I go back to New York.”

Richie feels his throat go dry. “I…did you…?” he starts.

Eddie turns to him, brow furrowed. “_No._ Jesus. No, I didn’t cheat on her. Give me some credit,” he sighs and frowns down at his phone.

Richie knows better than to probe further. He says, “I was wondering if you.” He starts again. If Eddie notices how awkward Richie’s been, he doesn’t show it. “I wanted to show you something at the edge of town. Do you want to go back to the hotel, make the call first?” 

Eddie doesn’t contemplate the idea for long before he says, “No. If you don’t mind me calling her first before you show me what you need to, we can do your thing. I just want to get this over with.”

They’re both silent on the drive there. Richie’s just about made it to the Kissing Bridge when Eddie says, “Stop here.” 

Richie does, and Eddie unfastens his seatbelt. “Wish me luck,” he says before grabbing his phone and getting out of the car.

Richie doesn’t hear most of it. His knuckled go white on the steering wheel as he faintly hears Eddie’s voice escalate into a shout, the sound muffled by the closed windows. It’s fully afternoon now and sunbeams reflect on the glass. Richie wants to lower the windows, claim it was an accident, but refrains. 

He catches a few choices phrases that make him wince. “_I’ve never cheated on you_.”

Then, “_Really. What have you always known, exactly? What did she warn you about?_”

A moment passes. Then another. Then Richie hears Eddie’s voice, pained, ask, _“Then why did you marry me? Why’d you ever bring marriage up in the first place, if you knew?”_

Richie takes a deep breath. It doesn’t…it doesn’t necessarily mean what he thinks it means. Any case, he shouldn’t be listening. But he is, because he’s Richie Tozier, lord and grand poo-bah of doing what he shouldn’t, and wanting what he shouldn’t.

“_Neither can I_,” Eddie says. Then he lowers his voice, and Richie can’t hear the rest of it. Instead he sits stock still, arms locked, hands gripped on the steering wheel. Thirty seconds later, the passenger door opens and Eddie clambers in, red-faced and tight-jawed.

Eddie speaks first. “All things considered,” he says, voice constricted, “it could’ve gone worse.” He offers Richie a thin, watery smile that fades almost immediately and he sucks in a deep breath.

“God, I just…_fuck_.” Eddie leans forward and smacks his head against the glove compartment. “I've been so fucking terrified of everything. I talked myself into thinking I had a million problems and a million allergies and I've never tested any of them. I married someone who brings out the worst in me and who is probably worse off for being married to me, let's be real. It’s like I escaped being hacked to pieces with a buzz saw, saw another buzz saw, and walked headfirst into it.”

“You didn’t remember,” Richie says. “None of us remembered. We were still haunted by it. Like the candlelit nights between me and your—”

“Beep beep, asshole,” Eddie says. 

Richie looks over at Eddie. He wants to touch him, wants to put a hand on his back and provide some comfort.

So he does.

Eddie doesn’t flinch or recoil or call him anything. Eddie exhales when Richie’s hand touches his back and moves in slow circles.

“All my life,” Eddie says slowly, “I’ve been told that I’m sick. I’m sick and I need to be cured and I don’t know what’s best for me, that I need my mother or my wife to make my choices for me, protect me from myself.”

A lump rises in Richie’s throat. His hand stills. He _wants._ He wants so desperately it steals his breath. 

“There’s nothing wrong with you,” Richie tells him. Eddie snorts. “I’m serious. You’re a short, neurotic, loud-mouthed know-it-all and you’re the best friend I’ve ever had. You don’t realize how lucky I am to know you, but I wish you did.”

Eddie doesn’t say anything, he takes another deep breath and sits up—Richie withdraws his hand and watches Eddie’s face. 

Eddie hasn’t been crying, but the muscles in his face are drawn tight. “I could’ve had a life before this. If I’d had the memories. If I was honest with myself. If I wasn’t so fucking scared all the time,” he says, more to himself than to Richie. 

Richie responds anyway. “I know the feeling,” he says.

Eddie turns to him. For a moment, he says nothing. There’s a shift between them; Richie senses it, is sure Eddie does too. Richie can’t name it; maybe he isn’t willing to. Like Eddie might be trying to tell him something Richie can’t let himself get his hopes up to believe. Maybe. Probably not. Can’t be. “Do you?” Eddie asks.

Richie forces his hands off the steering wheel. _It’s now or never,_ he thinks. He feels as though his brain may leave his body. He can’t do this. He has to do this. He takes a deep breath and rubs his shaking hands along the tops of his jeans.

“So…there’s something I want to show you,” Richie says. His mouth is dry. _This is such a stupid idea. Why is he so stupid why is he fucking up his friendship after just getting Eddie back and almost fucking losing him again why is he_

“What is it?” Eddie asks.

Richie says nothing. He doesn’t look at Eddie as he gets out of the car. “Follow me,” he says over his shoulder as he starts walking.

Richie gets there faster, of course. His hands are still shaking. His heart is pounding in his ears as he sees it. It’s faded, but present. He brings a hand to his mouth and tries to keep it together as Eddie reaches him.

“Hilarious,” Eddie says, not looking at any of the carvings. “You carved that you plowed my mom in the eighth grade. Should’ve seen that one coming.”

“_No_.” Richie takes a step back, away from Eddie. “Look. Look _there_,” he says, pointing. Richie had felt so brave when he’d carved it. Even if only he ever knew what it was or what he meant, at least _he_ knew. 

Eddie glances at him, looking equal parts curious and concerned, before peering down, crouching down and running his fingertips over Richie’s handiwork. It’s faded but still there. _Of course it’s still there,_ Richie thinks, delirious. _This isn’t a scar. This isn’t something that needs to heal_. 

“You carved this?” Eddie says after a moment.

Richie laughs. There are tears holding fort in his eyes. They won’t fall. He refuses. “Yeah. I was thirteen.”

“And it stands for…”

“Richie and Eddie.” Richie closes his eyes. He senses Eddie rise to stand, and even after opening his eyes can’t quite look at Eddie. “I…uh. Yeah, so this town and Pennywise did a number on me. And I was…I’ve been so fucking scared my entire life, and I’m so fucking sick of being scared. I’ve never said it, except for, for _this_—” he gestures at the Bridge, “in a way. The only way I thought I could.”

“Richie, slow down, what—”

“I’m gay.”

For a moment everything stops. Richie’s never said those words aloud before. Has barely allowed himself to think them as a cohesive sentence. His ears ring. He suddenly feels overheated. He takes several steps back and buries his hands in his pockets, wanting out. 

And the dam breaks.

_please say something I’m just going to keep going_

“And you were. You were kinda sorta definitely…my. Y’know. Awakening or whatever.”

Eddie’s stepped in closer to him. “Wait, you’re saying you…”

“Had a crush on you, yes. For a few years, actually, wanted to be your…your boyfriend and all that. And I was crazy about you and your rants and your shorts and your dumb little fannypacks and I didn’t know what the hell to do about and I was fucking terrified, because this place has always been a shithole for the future and current repressed and traumatized Homosexuals of America and—”

Eddie surges up, grabs Richie by the shoulders, and kisses him.

It takes a second for Richie to realize what Eddie’s doing, and another second to wrap one arm around Eddie’s back to pull him in closer and bring his free hand to Eddie’s face. He’s careful, careful as he can be about avoiding the wound on his cheek and wishes he could deepen the kiss further, but Eddie’s such a germaphobe, he probably would never let someone’s tongue in his mou—

Eddie parts his lips for him, and wraps his arms around Richie’s shoulders. One hand grips the back of Richie’s head and plays with the loose tendrils of messy, still-drying hair. Eddie’s lips are soft and he feels_ right_ in Richie’s arms. Feels like this is exactly where they’re supposed to be.

Richie doesn’t know how long the kiss last. And for once in his life he does not give a single solitary fuck if anyone sees or pieces it together that yes, Richie likes men and yes, Richie’s in love with Eddie goddamn Kaspbrak.

Eddie initiates the kiss, and he pulls away first, slowly. He looks up at Richie with those big dark eyes and grins before leaning up to kiss him again.

Richie’s cheek sting with tears and he opens his eyes, not knowing why he…he’s_ happy._ The happiest he’s ever been, so why is he crying?

Eddie pulls back to see it, and reaches up to wipe his thumbs along the tracks around Richie’s glasses. “Yeah, me too,” he says quietly. 

“This place really did a number on us, didn’t it?” Richie manages.

Eddie laughs; one hand stays curled loosely around Richie’s neck; his thumb brushes Richie’s stubble. “Yeah, that and a million other things.” 

“Some part of me still missed you,” Richie says, because it’s all out there now. “Even when I couldn’t remember you, I remembered how I felt back then.”

“Me too,” Eddie tells him. “I spent so long tamping it down and.” He sighs and rests his forehead low against Richie’s shoulder; Richie slides one hand along the length of Eddie’s back and breathes in the smell of his shampoo, trying to take in and remember every sensation of him.

Eddie sighs. "So you're headed back to the West coast and I'm getting divorced."

Richie absently strokes Eddie's back. "Could be the name of a country song.

"How about 'Even Though I Have to Go to New York and Face the Music and You Have Tour Dates I Want to See You Again.' Or, "Would You Wait for Me While I Sort My Life out?'"

Richie wonders how long he'll be allowed to hold Eddie, whose breathing has calmed down.

"They both rank up there with, 'I've Been Waiting my Whole Life for You, a Few Months are Nothing to Me.'"

Eddie snorts and pulls back. He searches Richie's face as if waiting for a _gotcha_ moment. There is none. Richie's not going to get bored and leave. He's not going to settle for someone else. Eddie is all he's ever wanted.

"We've got time this go around, don't we?" Eddie says, as though the concept hadn't occurred to him. To be fair, it hadn't fully occurred to Richie, either.

Richie thinks about it; no curse, no Pennywise, no dead friends or constant questioning of what might have been. Just the seven of them—no. Just him and Eddie, alive and intact and ready to live the rest of their lives precisely the way they want to.

“Yeah,” Richie repeats, grinning. “Yeah. We’ve got time.”

\---

**Author's Note:**

> -So, again, I did do some things differently, and I know I must have gotten a few details wrong since I haven't seen the movie in the theater in a little while, but hopefully it felt immersive and honest enough to work. I tried to get Richie to have friendship moments with all the other Losers but unfortunately wasn't able to squeeze in any buddy moments with Bill. I will try again on my next venture.  
-I edited a few bits here and there, mostly in that I was worried that Eddie and his marriage came across as a little one-dimensional. Obviously I don't think he and Myra have a good marriage, but making her the overbearing villain rather than his own lack of closure or ability to understand his own trauma was a mistake.   
-You can find me at ooihcnoiwlerh.tumblr.com, where not one of my It-related posts have ever shown up in the search engine. I am working on a follow-up to this, that spans Eddie's divorce, Richie's creative redemption, coming out narratives, and the journey going forward for Richie, Eddie, and all the Losers.


End file.
